The Pursuit of Harmony : Kepler on Cosmos, Confession, and Community

A committed Lutheran excommunicated from his own church, a friend to Catholics and Calvinists alike, a layman who called himself a “priest of God,” a Copernican in a world where Ptolemy still reigned, a man who argued at the same time for the superiority of one truth and the need for many truths to coexist—German astronomer Johannes Kepler was, to say the least, a complicated figure. With __The Pursuit of Harmony__, Aviva Rothman offers a new view of him and his achievements, one that presents them as a story of Kepler’s attempts to bring different, even opposing ideas and circumstances into harmony. Harmony, Rothman shows, was both the intellectual bedrock for and the primary goal of Kepler’s disparate endeavors. But it was also an elusive goal amid the deteriorating conditions of his world, as the political order crumbled and religious war raged. In the face of that devastation, Kepler’s hopes for his theories changed: whereas he had originally looked for a unifying approach to truth, he began instead to emphasize harmony as the peaceful coexistence of different views, one that could be fueled by the fundamentally nonpartisan discipline of mathematics. A committed Lutheran excommunicated from his own church, a friend to Catholics and Calvinists alike, a layman who called himself a "priest of God," a Copernican in a world where Ptolemy still reigned, a man who argued at the same time for the superiority of one truth and the need for many truths to coexist German astronomer Johannes Kepler was, to say the least, a complicated figure. With The Pursuit of Harmony, Aviva Rothman offers a new view of him and his achievements, one that presents them as a story of Kepler's attempts to bring different, even opposing ideas and circumstances into harmony. Harmony, Rothman shows, was both the intellectual bedrock for and the primary goal of Kepler's disparate endeavors. But it was also an elusive goal amid the deteriorating conditions of his world, as the political order crumbled and religious war raged. In the face of that devastation, Kepler's hopes for his theories changed: whereas he had originally looked for a unifying approach to truth, he began instead to emphasize harmony as the peaceful coexistence of different views, one that could be fueled by the fundamentally nonpartisan discipline of mathematics 'The Pursuit of Harmony' follows astronomer Johannes Kepler and his efforts to establish harmony across the religious, scientific, and political boundaries of 17th century Europe. Kepler, it argues, hoped to harness his vision of cosmic harmony to a new vision of political and religious harmony, in which diverse perspectives could coexist in one peaceful community. The text situates Kepler at the heart of confessional struggles about the future of Lutheranism and its relationship to other Christian confessions, at the centre of debates within the Republic of Letters about the new science, and in the midst of the heated court politics of the Holy Roman Empire On Kepler's works and translations -- Introduction: Kepler and the harmonic ideal -- "The study of divine things": Kepler as astronomer-priest -- "Matters of conscience": Kepler and the Lutheran Church -- "Of God and his community": Kepler and the Catholic Church -- "An ally in the search for truth": Kepler and Galileo -- "Political digression(s)": Kepler and the harmony of the state -- "The Christian resolution of the calendar": Kepler as impartial mathematician -- Conclusion: perspective, perception, and pluralism